Driver Caused Burlingame Tragedy, Not an E-Bike Rider

A motorist collided with a cyclist and then drove onto a sidewalk and into a Burlingame restaurant Friday evening, killing a four-year-old boy and injuring a six-year-old girl.

From ABC7’s reporting:

“It appears the vehicle was leaving the parking lot and collided with a bicyclist, creating a chain reaction [emphasis added] hitting the curb, striking two juveniles, crashing into the restaurant,” [Burlingame Police Lieutenant David] Perna said.

SFGate also referred to it as a “chain reaction” crash in both its headline and lead about the tragedy.

And from the Burlingame Police statement on Facebook:

The investigation has determined that the vehicle was entering the roadway of Donnelly Avenue from the driveway of Municipal Parking Lot D when it was struck by an eastbound e-bike. The vehicle then accelerated forward across Donnelly Avenue, onto the north sidewalk, and into the Truffle Bar Restaurant, where it came to rest.

“What is a ‘chain reaction’ and why does it force a driver onto the sidewalk?” asked Peninsula safety advocate Mike Swire.

Of course, the answer is simple: it doesn’t. A bicycle doesn’t have the mass to crash into a car and discernibly change its motion. That didn’t stop Nextdoor and Facebook from overflowing with posts blaming the cyclist with comments such as “Those e-bike are a real problem something needs to be done about those crazy riders.”

Of course, under no scenario, not even a “chain reaction,” did the e-bike rider cause the driver to run into two children and strike the front of a restaurant. Moreover, the e-bike rider apparently had the right-of-way. “Local police have confirmed e-bike riders were in the traffic lane and the driver pulled in front of them instead of yielding to oncoming traffic,” wrote Swire in an email to Streetsblog.

“An unfortunate aspect of driving jurisprudence and culture is that when a driver hits something, the person or thing they hit often gets blamed, independent of driver behavior,” wrote Isabella Chu, a health researcher at Stanford University.

Yes, e-bikes and other forms of micromobility can be problematic or even deadly on rare occasions. But trying to blame the bicyclists for this crash is just the latest example of this disconnect in American traffic enforcement and culture. It’s absurd that there’s so much focus on regulating e-bikes, when a law to try and control drivers from speeding gets vetoed.

Moreover, Burlingame and other cities need to reduce the number of parking lots, improve local transit, and start creating more car-free zones so there are fewer people driving downtown in the first place. “The proximal source of effectively all the lethal force in our transportation system is cars,” wrote Chu. “So that’s what we should limit.”

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